Google really hates when people try to game Google. So, Google has severely punished Rap Genius.

If you try to search for "Rap Genius" you won't get the website. You'll get its Twitter page, its Wikipedia entry, its Facebook page, but you won't get a direct link to the website. Searching for lyrics no longer brings Rap Genius pages.

Rap Genius and Google are reportedly working on a solution to fix the problem.

The idea has people excited, but the founders of the company make some people nervous. They're kids from Yale, but act like they're rappers. They talk trash, dress unusually, and do goofy stuff like, well, like this.

I agree that it's next to impossible to know what Google's Rules are these days:

After getting caught trying to game Google, Rap Genius apologized, but at the same time, tried to deflect blame by saying others do the same:

"We effed up, other lyrics sites are almost definitely doing worse stuff, and we’ll stop. We’d love for Google to take a closer look at the whole lyrics search landscape and see whether it can make changes that would improve lyric search results."

Danny Sullivan, who understands the mechanics of Google's search results better than anyone who doesn't work at Google, said:

"We don’t know exactly why Rap Genius is in trouble because Google won’t say (yes, we asked, and we got a no comment on the matter for now). We know it’s in trouble because it’s no longer ranking, but ironically, this might be because since Rap Genius has declared itself in violation of Google’s guidelines, Google acted to penalize it based on that, even if Rap Genius might have been fine.

The point is — understanding what’s a good link with Google is incredibly hard these days. Google tells you links are important to rank; Google also tells you an increasing number of rules about which links “count” or how links might hurt you or even how you may need to “disavow” links."

One point lost on Danny Sullivan: Rap Genius is about ANNOTATION not LYRICS:

And Sullivan adds one more point, which is huge for investors in Rap Genius. He says that Google might eventually just nuke Rap Genius altogether by providing its own lyric pages:

Finally, it’s probably an incredibly dumb business model to be doing a lyrics site that hopes for Google traffic in a time when Google, like Bing, is moving toward providing direct answers. Lyrics, to my understanding, often have to be licensed. That makes them a candidate for Google to license directly and provide as direct answers.

"Lastly this reminds me of the point I made before about Facebook's central role in the growth of "viral" web content. Having a lot of traffic is great. The more the better. But when a huge share of your traffic comes from one particular source, it's really not your traffic. If it's all search, then it's Google's traffic. If it's all Facebook likes, then it's Facebook's traffic."

Rap Genius designed itself to be eminently Google-able. The whole thing is a gaudy, whirring, hyperactive link-bazaar. Links to and from YouTube, links to images, articles, other Rap Genius pages—links upon links, links for the sake of links—a constant work in progress to make the entire internet one giant hyperlink to itself. For Google, this is web catnip, and it showed: a week ago, if you googled virtually any rap lyric or track name, Rap Genius would be the first result. Number one.